THEME: BINGO! (66A: "You got it!" ... or a possible cry after hearing the calls hidden in the answers to the starred clues?) — theme answers have parts that sound like Bingo squares (specifically "B" followed by a number)
Theme answers:
RUBY TUESDAY (17A: *Restaurant chain named after a Rolling Stones song) ("B-2")
BENIGNLY (26A: *Without malice) ("B-9")
"THAT'D BE WONDERFUL" (34A: *"What a great idea!") ("B-1")
UNBEATEN (48A: *Having a perfect record) ("B-10")
BABY FORMULA (55A: *Similac or Enfamil) ("B-4")
Word of the Day: James IJAMES (9D: Pulitzer-winning "Fat Ham" playwright) —
The revealer came as a total surprise. I solved this as a themeless—no clue what was going on—and was repeatedly surprised at how stuck I kept getting. I don't know if it was the cluing or what, but man this played slow for me today. The only answer I can point to as definitely harder-than-Wednesday material is James IJAMES (a name I'd never seen and had no hope of even partially inferring). Otherwise, nothing in the grid was unknown to me. I simply kept struggling to get answers quickly. Things like AFEW for 53D: Three or four, say, or OARED for 63A: Got in a row? (surface meaning = confusing—am I supposed to hear "row," rhymes with "cow," like a British "row," to-do, dust-up, quarrel, etc.???) (I know that the punny meaning is "row" rhymes with "tow" ... no idea by what possible mental gymnastics "got in a row" can be said to mean simply "rowed," i.e. OARED, but ... here we are). I found BOW OUT hardish (26D: Take one's leave). I found TUTU oddly hard (41A: You might take a spin in this) ("I" might not, actually). Even LANGUOROUSLY didn't come easily to me from its clue (16D: Indulgently lazy). Not sure why "lazy" doesn't compute for me there. So I was like "is this really Wednesday?" for much of the puzzle. I can't say I had a very good time. But (and it's a big but), the revealer did really work some magic. I suppose I could've just looked at the revealer clue at any time and begun trying to piece things together, but I was never *that* desperate, and anyway, I'm not sure knowing the theme would've helped much with getting the themers (which weren't, themselves, that hard to get—didn't struggle with them at all). It's an OK grid with a wonderful (!), surprising theme lying underneath. I think I just had a bad morning. I slept fine. But last night was my first night alone in a very long time (my wife Penelope is in the sky as we speak heading to NZ for a funeral). So ... loneliness. I blame my solving sluggishness on loneliness (the cats are now looking at me all offended, like "hey, we're standing right here!").
[Frank and Bing(o)!]
About IJAMES, though ... Must be very cool to see your name in the grid. And I think I would've been happy to learn that name ... on a Saturday. But on a Wednesday, I was like "how in the world do I not know the name of a famous playwright!!!?" Turns out, I don't know the names of literally any of the playwrights who have won the Pulitzer for Drama since the '90s. Oh, sorry, I do know one. I only have to go back to 2008, when Tracy LETTS won for August: Osage County. But even LETTS, who is quite famous as playwrights go (he's also an actor, married to another actor (Carrie Coon), and has Tonys for both writing and acting), even he, at a grid-friendly five letters long and with extremely grid-friendly letters, has appeared in the NYTXW just once (!). 21st-century playwrights don't have quite the cultural penetration that their predecessors did. The list of Pulitzer winners for Drama in this century is loaded with people whose names seem like they would work very well in crosswords. There's EBONI Booth (2024), and KATORI Hall (2021), and SANAZ TOOSSI (2023) (I know neither of those name parts has been in the grid before!). Lynn NOTTAGE has won twice! (2009, 2017). And yet, NYTXW appearances: zero. Does my knowledge of playwrights fall off because I got old and stopped paying attention? As late as the early '90s, the Drama Pulitzer winners seem like titans: KUSHNER! SIMON! WILSON! And of course the king of crossword playwriting, Edward ALBEE (Three Tall Women, 1994—his third win)! I suppose with a daughter currently studying at the Yale Bleeping School of Bleeping Drama,* I should probably brush up on my playwright knowledge. I wonder if she knew IJAMES. I'll ask. I'll bet she did.
Bullets:
5D: Meal cooked in simmering broth (HOT POT) — easy enough. My only beef here is with the crossing answer, PANT, which has the word "Hot" in the clue (20A: Make like a hot dog). Weird / bad to pivot from HOT POT to a clue with "hot dog" in it.
27A: ^ (CARET) — there are officially too many ways to spell "CARE-utt." I went with CARAT today. I knew it wasn't KARAT, and there weren't enough letters for CARROT. But CARET never occurred to me. I see the mark "^" all the time, or at least not infrequently. But I rarely see it spelled. As I said, slow morning for me.
59D: That's the kicker! (LEG) — love this, but this is what I'm talking about with the clues today—they are auditioning to be Fri/Sat clues and you can feel it.
62A: Save on wedding invitations, in a way (ELOPE) — again, brain not work right. I read "save" as a noun, like "thing you should save," as in "the date." "Save the date!" Invitations still say that, right? Man I need coffee.
18D: Country known for luxury tourism, in brief (UAE) — well, how's that going for you? Luxurious enough?
1A: Young grasshopper (NYMPH) — 1-Across really set the tone for me today. Just ... no idea. None. Zero. I never think about young grasshoppers or what they are called. Bizarre to name them after sexy nature deities, but I'm sure entomologists have their reasons.
Gotta run. See you next time.
*It's actually the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University but I just can't
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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[22A: Sci-fi character who says "Your father, he is"]
THEME: TERMINALLY ONLINE (62A: Hopelessly internet-brained ... or a description of the ends of 17-, 26-, 37- and 47-Across?) — answers end with things associated with a web browser (making the answers themselves TERMINALLY ONLINE, so to speak)
Theme answers:
GIRL SCOUT COOKIES (17A: Thin Mints and Tagalongs)
SAUSAGE LINK (26A: One in a breakfast chain?)
LSD TAB (37A: Dose dropped for a trip)
HIGH PROFILE (47A: Likely to attract attention, as in a criminal case)
Word of the Day: cookies (see 17A) —
An HTTP cookie (also called web cookie, Internet cookie, browser cookie, or simply cookie) is a small block of data created by a web server while a user is browsing a website and placed on the user's computer or other device by the user's web browser. Cookies are placed on the device used to access a website, and more than one cookie may be placed on a user's device during a session.
Cookies serve useful and sometimes essential functions on the web. They enable web servers to store stateful information (such as items added in the shopping cart in an online store) on the user's device or to track the user's browsing activity (including clicking particular buttons, logging in, or recording which pages were visited in the past). They can also be used to save information that the user previously entered into form fields, such as names, addresses, passwords, and payment card numbers for subsequent use.
• • •
Well I love the phrase TERMINALLY ONLINE, but I don't know about this themer set. It feels like a very sparse / loose / arbitrary grouping: cookies, link, tab, profile. I guess they are all generally in the "being online" universe, but that's a pretty big universe, and these four things don't feel like a complete or meaningful set. Not as complete or meaningful as I might like my themer set to be. I can't see "cookies" and so even though I know I have (sometimes) "accepted" them, I don't meaningfully, purposefully interact with them, the way I very clearly do with, say, a "link." And "link" is a part of an internet site, while "tab" and "profile" are parts of the browsers themselves. Actually, "profile" is really ambiguous, because I've got a "Profiles" option on my browser menu (I appear to be operating currently under my "Rex Parker" profile, on my Chrome browser), but then a "user profile" might be part of all kinds of websites, particularly social media sites, so I don't really know what "profile" is supposed to evoke for me here. The overall "online" grouping here seems weak. The revealer is great, and I can see how you'd want to take that phrase and do a theme in precisely this vein, but the execution here was just a little disappointing. Got an "oh, I guess, yeah," rather than a "wow, nice!" from me.
And before I got to the (admittedly great) revealer, I was slogging through some rough stuff, starting with ANIL, which made me stop short (14A: Indigo dye). "Really, we're doing ANIL? On an easy Tuesday puzzle in the year of our lord 2026? Back to 1999 with you, ANIL!" Certain words scream "crosswordese!" and boy that is one of them. Not hard (if you have been solving for decades), but unappealing. IDED and HST and CUDI and a handful of other repeaters made the top of this puzzle unpleasant to hack through. The most off-putting thing in the grid, for me, was TYVM (short for "thank you very much") (32A: "It's super-appreciated!," in a modern initialism). I think I'm not TERMINALLY ONLINE enough to appreciate it. I think it's more often used sarcastically, as when you are ironically defending yourself, the way you might use the full phrase ("thankyouverymuch"). Here is a random example that Wordnik scraped from some dank corner of the internet:
In my day (yes, I'm old and I know it, tyvm) our public school back in Ohio had FRUIT machines where we could buy apples, oranges or banana's.
and another:
Our blog isn't "DEAD", 'tis just on a prolonged hiatus tyvm :/
But it also just means regular old "thank you very much." I type thx, but have never been able to bring myself to use "ty" ("... who's Ty?"), and have definitely made the leap to "tyvm." Anyway, this initialism is a real enough thing, I just hate it. The rest of the non-theme fill in this grid is mostly blah. Inoffensive. OK. ALL THUMBS got a metaphorical "thumbs-up" from me as I plunked it down in the grid, and MOVIE CLIP and AVANT-GARDE are both rock solid. Kind of weird to have extra, non-thematic internet stuff going on in the grid (stuff like BLOG POST (40D: Bit of internet writing), or SENT (as clued) (61D: Label that's typically between "Inbox" and "Drafts")). Always seems more elegant when theme-related material stays contained entirely within the theme answers. Overall, this is a neat idea, semi-clunkily executed.
Bullets:
10D: Home to Shibuya Crossing, the world's busiest pedestrian intersection (TOKYO) — this probably should've been my "Word of the Day." You may never have heard of Shibuya Crossing, but I'm fairly sure that if you've seen any shots of TOKYO on movies or television, you've seen it. It's as iconic as Times Square.
Shibuya Scramble Crossing (渋谷スクランブル交差点, Shibuya sukuranburu kōsaten), commonly known as Shibuya Crossing, is a scramble crossing in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. It is located near Shibuya Station in Shibuya, a major commercial and entertainment district in Tokyo. It has been described as the world's busiest pedestrian crossing, with as many as 3,000 people crossing during a single green light cycle. Inaugurated in 1973, the intersection is a popular tourist destination and a widely recognized symbol of the city of Tokyo through its frequent appearances in television, film, and other media. (wikipedia)
5D: Old-fashioned, for one (COCKTAIL) — in my NYTXW spreadsheet, I track not only Star Wars references ("Hello darknessYODA my old friend..."), but COCKTAIL-related answers as well. I like the latter a lot better. I love a good Old-fashioned, though we don't really make them at home (we're more Manhattan and Manhattan-variant people, although my favorite COCKTAIL is the 100-Year-Old Cigar). Not sure this is the recipe my wife uses, but it'll do—from Difford's:
[I don't even like cigars, but this drink ... !]
12D: Like patrons at the door of a "21+ only" nightclub, informally (IDED) — was looking for some kind of "informal" word for "adult" and was prepared to be very annoyed by some horrible new slang like "ADDO" or something. "Thankfully" the answer was just IDED (I say "Thankfully" quote-unquote because IDED is terrible ... but at least it's understandable)
That's all. See you next time.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. All my love to my beautiful wife, Penelope, who is leaving (on a jet plane) tonight to attend her aunt's memorial in NZ. The cats and I will miss her. (The flight was supposed to leave yesterday but weather conditions in NYC made that impossible.) Oh, and thank you all very much (hey, TYVM!!!) for yesterday's condolences.
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A long time ago, I was solving this puzzle and got stuck at an unguessable (to me) crossing: N. C. WYETH crossing NATICK at the "N"—I knew WYETH but forgot his initials, and NATICK ... is a suburb of Boston that I had no hope of knowing. It was clued as someplace the Boston Marathon runs through (???). Anyway, NATICK— the more obscure name in that crossing—became shorthand for an unguessable cross, esp. where the cross involves two proper nouns, neither of which is exceedingly well known. NATICK took hold as crossword slang, and the term can now be both noun ("I had a NATICK in the SW corner...") or verb ("I got NATICKED by 50A / 34D!")
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